The mystery is how anyone falls for it

This is a spot-on summary of fascism, and jesus christ, but it sounds familiar to this American.

It’s a gross political pathology, always doomed to failure, so how did it take over this country?

It feels like we need a diagnosis of Rapid Onset Fascism here, but I also know it’s been festering for a long time in a dunghill of racism and religious dogma and American exceptionalism and the myth of rugged individualism.

Meanwhile, Christopher Rufo has a plan.

Third, the president should direct federal agencies to create a hard-soft, or visible-invisible, approach to riot control. In public, the National Guard should mobilize with enough manpower to smother the protests and avoid protracted conflict or hand-to-hand combat, which carries with it the highest level of risk. At the same time, as we saw demonstrated in Portland, Oregon, during the George Floyd riots, the agencies should dispatch unmarked vans to follow key agitators and snatch them from the streets while the media are not looking. The most effective riot controlis to take movement leaders off the field, infiltrate their networks, disrupt the flow of funding, and roll them up in federal investigations. Denying the Left trained protest leaders now will create a strong precedent for the rest of the president’s term.

Does anyone have any objections to unmarked vans full of men wearing masks snatching people off the street? Anyone?

They let Tom Cotton write another op-ed

It got published on the WSJ opinion page, so you know it’s garbage. It turns out he’s a real chickenhawk…but we all knew that already.

The article begins,

Violent insurrectionists turned areas of Los Angeles into lawless hellscapes over the weekend, with anarchists setting fire to vehicles, throwing scooters and debris at police, and looting businesses—all while waving foreign flags.

We can stop right there. I’ve heard this before, about Minneapolis, another lawless hellscape. There are people who still claim that Minneapolis was burned to the ground by rioters, but I can drive into the city and see it thriving. This is a common game played by the far right: take any protest against authoritarian rule, no matter how peaceful, and inflate it into apocalyptic chaos. It’s a contrived casus belli, where the the war is targeted against the poor, the working class, and non-white people. Don’t listen to Tom Cotton, the WSJ, or Fox News, and instead read what actual residents say.

The crowd in Grand Park, and at a handful of downtown hotspots on Monday, mixed intense anger at Huerta’s detention, the immigration raids he was protesting when he was injured and arrested, and the presence of National Guard troops at the Roybal Federal Building, with determination, pride and even joy. You could see mini-reunions break out in the crowd, people reconnecting to join in common purpose. (I had a couple of these moments myself.) Los Angeles has thus far emerged from four days of protest with a clear set of goals: driving ICE, the National Guard, and apparently now the Marines from the city and county. And there’s a sense of this as a beginning, a cross between an organizing kickoff and a backyard barbeque, complete with the ubiquitous bacon-wrapped hot dog carts, manned by migrants as well.

The spasms of defiance, impressive though they may be, are scattered. Practically the entirety of the city is going about its business, blissfully unaware of what’s mainly taking place within a five-block radius. Even from block to block you could encounter nothing, followed by a combination of cries of “¡Chinga la migra!” (“Fuck the border patrol!”) and Tejano music. And while lingering images of burnt-out self-driving Waymo cars continue to play out on television and social media, the mood and spirit on Monday was overwhelmingly peaceful. The tensest standoff was led by clergy.

I didn’t know hellscapes featured bacon-wrapped hot dog carts! I don’t eat either bacon or hot dogs, so maybe that’s the horror Tom Cotton is whining about. Fortunately, alternatives are available.

A crowd of a few hundred protesters had marched along the bridge over the 101 Freeway and toward the historic El Pueblo de Los Angeles, a public park featuring a gazebo and a statue of King Carlos III of Spain. Just as the protesters had taken root on the gazebo and begun chanting, a massive semi-trailer rolled up, with a five-piece Tejano band in the bed of the truck. The band, Los Jornaleros del Norte, is made up of day laborers; the lead singer had a “Fuck ICE” shirt on, while a man holding another hybrid U.S./Mexico flag hung off the back. And the entire crowd shifted its attention to cheer raucously along to the music.

Suddenly, the protest had transformed into a celebration of the culture of Los Angeles and the roots from which it came. People waved their signs in time with the music and beamed as they danced and sang their free expression. Representatives of Homeboy Bakery, a local business that employs former gang members and at-risk youth (“Nothing stops a bullet like a job” is their motto), started giving out scones and pastries. Others handed out water.

Tejano bands and free scones? That’s more like it. Tom Cotton wants to end that.

The solution now is the same as I said then: an overwhelming show of force to end the riots.

Here’s a slogan in response, painted on the Edward Roybal Federal Building:

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty

All eugenicists are incompetent geneticists

It’s more of a pathetic squeak.

Dave Futrelle found something provocative: a new type of guy (and he has lots of opinions about breeding). It’s an out-and-proud eugenicist, one who doesn’t seem to know very much about genetics, but he has written an unfinished app called Seekia, a genetics aware mate discovery network with the goal to help humanity mate in a genetics aware manner. It makes many grand claims about being able to compare your genetic constitution to that of a potential mate, and calculate the likelihood of healthy offspring. It is not at all clear where it’s getting genetic information from, so the premise is dubious, but also the app announces that it is incomplete, and cannot actually connect to the internet, so its conclusions are entirely imaginary. Furthermore, you can’t directly download the silly thing: you have to download the source code, and compile it for yourself.

No, I’m not going to do that.

Anyway, Futrelle had many examples of claims made by the creator of Seekia on Bluesky that were entertainingly demented, but Bluesky’s censorship police seems to have deleted them. Damn you, Bluesky! No, wait, that’s actually one of the good features of Bluesky, that weird stupid racist garbage is less likely to survive. Maybe he should use Twitter.

Do not be dismayed by all the “Post not found, it may have been deleted” announcements all over the We Hunted the Mammoth article. The creator of Seekia, Simon Sarasova, has helpfully archived his posts on his own web page, so you can still be entertained by his stupid thoughts. What would you do without this insight?

Obesity is an enormous problem which harms billions of people.

Obesity causes people to be uglier, less mobile, less healthy, less capable of having sex, and less able to enact virtue in the world.

Humanity should use eugenic techniques to reduce the prevalence of obesity.

The world would be a better place without obesity.

The answer is eugenics. Or what about this problem?

Stupid people are worse at driving cars.

Humanity should use eugenic techniques to make people more intelligent and better at driving cars.

The world would be a better place with fewer car accidents.

Cool. Instead of traffic tickets, the police will just send a medical team to your house to sterilize your children, I guess. They’ll also check those children to enforce gender norms.

Humanity should use eugenic techniques to reduce the prevalence of gender dysphoria disorder.

The world would be a better place without gender dysphoria disorder.

He’s also fond of quoting the Unabomber and Stefan Molyneux. But those are all short, social media style posts — to really see deeply into his shallow thoughts, you have to read his blog. Here’s an excerpt from one of his articles, Why Race Extinction Matters, so you can better understand why maybe responsible social networks are undermining his ability to spread his message.

Modern transportation technology has facilitated the spread of all human races to all regions of the world. This has accelerated the rate of interracial breeding, and has thus accelerated the rate of change in humanity’s appearance. I posit that global population growth and modern widespread human race mixing have both increased the total quantity of races. Novel combinations of races are being bred into existence.

Many modern human races are at risk of going extinct. Both the increased prevalence of interracial breeding and global fertility collapse are contributing to the risk of race extinction. Without intervention, all modern human races will eventually go extinct due to evolution, which gradually changes each race until their old traits disappear. For example, modern humans look very different from humans who lived 100,000 years ago.

Seekia is a race aware mate discovery network I created. Users can share their racial information in their profiles and filter prospective mates based on their race and the calculated race of their offspring.

One of Seekia’s goals is to help prevent race extinctions by helping members of modern endangered human races to meet and have children.

I don’t think he understands the terms “race,” “extinction,” or “genetics,” while simultaneously being obsessed with race, extinction, and genetics. Also with beauty, circumcision, acne, driving, baldness, female body hair, penis size, and obesity.

He fits right into the Manosphere. Although…does the manosphere still exist? You don’t hear much about it anymore.

My sentiments exactly

Here. Read this essay.

Much has been made of an alleged “crisis of masculinity” among America’s young men. This sort of sweeping cultural proclamation should always make you skeptical. As an angle, it is catnip because everyone can fill in its details based on their own lives, and male writers, in particular, can use it as a launching pad to subtly cast themselves as the sort of well-developed masculine figure who might—now that you mention it—serve as a good role model.

I don’t know about all of that. What I do know is that if you are looking for negative role models for masculine virtue, there is an easy way to find them. They are employed by ICE. They are employed by the Department of Homeland Security. They are employed by the sprawling and unaccountable security state, and right now, they are out on the streets of our cities, snatching up mothers and infiltrating elementary schools. There is much to be said about the political processes that deployed these men, and the chain of socioeconomic failures that placed our nation in the position we find ourselves. But there is another important thing to be said directly to the men who go to work every day and don the tactical vests and facemasks and act like the willing gestapo agents of our idiot political leader: You guys are fucking cowards.

Tough guy? No. Straight up fucking coward, man. Pathetic. Jesus. Have some self-respect.

Exactly. Tough guys don’t wear masks and rough up working class people on the street. And they don’t follow the orders of America’s psycho version of Goebbels like these petty thugs on a power trip.

The Wall Street Journal reported on a meeting last month where Stephen Miller summoned ICE’s leadership to a meeting where he demanded that federal agents lower their standards and “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens,” outside of 7-11 or wherever. “‘Who here thinks they can do it?’ Miller said, asking for a show of hands.” The outcome of that demand can be seen in the ongoing terrorization of immigrants happening across the country.

Now, Stephen Miller is a little rat-faced Nazi bitch. Since his youth just about everyone around him has despised him because he has always been a miserable racist little shit whose evil heart is manifested in his detestable rodent-like visage. Knowing that, I like to imagine all those big, bad, ICE agents, manly men, so macho, shifting uncomfortably around a conference room table as they are harangued by that psychotic little bureaucrat, and then rushing out to kidnap working men from a Home Depot parking lot in order to demonstrate to their master, Stephen Bitch Ass Miller, how good they are at being America’s new gestapo.

You want to see real bravery? Click here. There’s the hero we need.

Twitchy, puffed up, goofy ass cops. No amount of guns and steroids and tear gas will ever make you cool. Fuck off, losers.

In case you’re looking for role models, here’s another one.

California is creating absolute legends.

Jinxed!?

For over a decade now, I’ve been accustomed to screwing myself up every summer. I spend the school year focused on teaching stuff (and being snowbound much of the time), and then when I’m released in May, I leap into action and overdo it, and then every summer I can guarantee I’ll spend a month or two laid up with a knee or ankle or both wrecked. I’ve got crutches and braces set aside just in case. You don’t see most of it because you’re seeing me through the teeny-tiny porthole of the internet.

But not this year, so far (knock on wood). I’ve changed my behavior. I started out with a leisurely walk for 40 minutes to an hour every single day — every day is the key, I think. Easing into my summer routine is helping, and now I’m ramping up into a brisk walk. No pain yet! Actually, I’m feeling pretty good. Maybe I’m doing something right.

Another factor: I’m not teaching this fall, which has removed an amazing amount of stress from my life. I can’t actually separate the physical from the psychological.

Anyway, that means that right now I am compelled to get out of the house and go for a walk. Bye!

Ban Charlie Kirk and Matt Walsh

They don’t do anything productive, and are just fanning the flames of a destructive hatred. We have a huge cultural, educational, housing, financial, and essential services problem to fix now because of their rhetoric.

@charliekirk11 It’s time to ban third world immigration, legal or illegal. We’ve reached our limit and we have a huge cultural, educational, housing, financial, and essential services problem to fix now because of it. We need a net-zero immigration moratorium with a ban on all third worlders.
@MattWalshBlog Ban all third world immigration. Legal or illegal. There should be a moratorium on all immigration from the third world. We’ve reached our capacity. We cannot be the world’s soup kitchen anymore.

Meanwhile, the immigrants:

That tells you how ethnically diverse California is. It’s mostly “third-worlders”. Are they proposing to hollow out one of the richest states in the country?

Of course, money isn’t everything.

OK, Matt and Charlie can stay, as long as they are washing dishes or waiting at the Home Depot to provide cheap labor on construction crews. But if they can’t provide the cultural energy of hard-working “third-worlders,” give ’em the boot.

Evil and stupid?

OK, Republicans suck, have wicked intentions, and are wrecking the country. Their one saving grace, the one thing that gives me hope, is that they’re idiots.

Now that they’ve taken over legislatures all over the place, they’ve decided that the proper use of their power is to pass laws against imaginary things they don’t like. Like chemtrails.

Known to less conspiratorially minded as aircraft contrails, or the white vaporous lines streaming out of an airplane’s engines at altitude, chemtrails are a longstanding conspiracy theory.

Believers in chemtrails hold that the aircraft vapor trails that criss-cross skies across the globe every day are deliberately laden with toxins that are using commercial aircraft to spray them on people below, perhaps to enslave them to big pharma, or exert mind control, or sterilize people or even control the weather for nefarious motives.

Despite the outlandishness of the belief and the complete absence of evidence, a 2016 study showed that the idea is held to be “completely true” by 10% of Americans and “somewhat true” by a further 20%-30% of Americans.

At least eight states, including Florida and Tennessee, have now introduced chemtrail-coded legislation to prohibit “geo-engineering” or “weather modification”. Louisiana’s bill, which must pass through the senate before reaching Governor Jeff Landry’s desk, orders the department of environmental quality to record reported chemtrail sightings and pass complaints on to the Louisiana air national guard.

I heartily endorse that they waste their time and energy on laws against non-existent phenomena — it’s much better than their usual hateful nonsense. I’m not sure how they’re going to enforce it, though. Notify the air national guard? To do what? Fly up and make a few contrails of their own?

Of course they have the King and Queen of Stupid backing their futile flailings.

“We are going to stop this crime,” the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, posted on X in August. Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said in a post before Hurricane Milton struck in October: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” Even Donald Trump has spread the conspiracy theory that Joe Biden is dead and has been replaced by a robotic clone.

To be fair, though, I have to admit that they have recruited a few allies. Would you believe there are Canadian anti-vaxxers? Six kids have been born in Ontario with congenital measles.

Ontario’s chief medical officer of health says six infants have been born with congenital measles since an outbreak began last fall, adding they were infected in the womb through mothers who were not vaccinated.

Dr. Kieran Moore says these infants recovered, but their infections could have been prevented if their mothers had been vaccinated and protected from contracting measles.

Congenital measles can result in severe complications, including inflammation of the brain and death.

Perhaps more benignly, counties in Washington state are passing laws to protect Bigfoot.

Clark County is the latest among a growing list of counties taking steps to protect Washington’s favorite cryptid, Bigfoot. On Tuesday, the county council passed a resolution designating all of Clark County as a refuge for the large, hairy, humanlike creatures.

According to the resolution, read by council Chair Sue Marshall, “legends, sightings and investigations suggest that a bipedal apelike creature known as Bigfoot, aka Sasquatch, may exist in the remote portions of Clark County” and should be protected, if it exists, as “the rareness of sightings indicates an extreme endangered creature.”

Even if Bigfoot isn’t real, the resolution acknowledges the folklore surrounding Bigfoot highlights the need for stewardship of the county’s wild places and natural landscape.

I like the recognition of the importance of the environment, so I can’t be too irate at the waste of time — you know Bigfoot doesn’t exist, right?

Also, this was legislation prompted by elementary school kids, so I’d want to encourage that kind of civic participation.

What’s your excuse, Bobby and Marjorie?

That PR coup went perfectly

Meanwhile, out on the sunny Mediterranean, a small ship carrying a token amount of humanitarian aid and Greta Thunberg sailed to Gaza, protesting the Israeli blockade of Palestine. Israel has seized the ship and arrested all on board for the crime of attempting to deliver food to starving people.

This is exactly what they wanted, you know. A small ship, an unarmed crew, a negligible amount of supplies…the only way they could make a difference is if Israel drew attention to them with this kind of excessive military action. Thunberg is smiling because she successfully provoked the action they wanted.

Rise up!

I went on a news fast this past weekend. I did anything other than read what’s going on in this tyrannical hell hole of a country. Then what happens?

The president of the United States tries to instigate a civil war with California.

ICE thugs targeted Los Angeles and seized hundreds of people for deportation, and the California citizenry responded with protests and interfering with unlawful arrests…so Trump sent in the National Guard, and upon finding that most of the demonstrations were peaceful, decided to blow up the situation. An armed military presence! Tear gas guns! Barricades in the streets!

And then Trump came after Los Angeles.

Fueling the fury was the brutality with which federal agents had approached its targets, including a clothing manufacturer in Los Angeles’s garment district, and Home Depot in the Westlake district and a warehouse in South Los Angeles. The arrests were carried out without judicial warrants, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) – advocates say that more than 200 people were taken.

Lawyers reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been holding detained families in the basements of federal immigration facilities, separating children and mothers from their fathers. Agents have refused access to attorneys and family members, according to the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef).

As masked immigration officers ripped workers away from their jobs, other agents in riot gear attacked protesters with tear gas and flash bang grenades, escalating a handful of isolated demonstrations into a clash that roiled the city and spurred several hundred to join the protest.

Look at those brave bastards! They’re armed with cameras, flags, and signs, and they’re up against these guys:

Meanwhile, here in rural Minnesota, it was a quiet weekend, a bit on the cool side with occasional rain. I didn’t see any masked ICE gestapo, or any troops in military gear. We hear about occasional flare-ups in Minneapolis, usually driven by those ICE assholes trying to arrest workers, but nothing here.

I still stand with those heroes in Los Angeles.